Television programs, movies, and video games most commonly provide visual stimulation from a television screen display and audio stimulation from the speakers connected to the television. There are some known systems that attempt to enhance a viewer's/user's experience by providing a more interactive/responsive environment. For example, some video gaming systems cause lighting devices such as lamps to generate an ambient light effect (“ALE”) during game play.
To provide an enjoyable interactive experience, the lighting devices need to generate the ambient light effects at appropriate times when the associated scene is displayed to a user. In addition, the lighting devices need to generate a variety of ambient light effects to appropriately match a variety of scenes and action sequences in a movie or a video game. Thus, an ambient light effect-capable system needs to be able to identify one or more scenes during the display of which an ambient light effect is to be generated.
One such system focuses on detecting and analyzing various parameters of the video file or video game application and generating ambient light effects based on the detected parameters. One problem with such an approach is that many video files and video games include various access restrictions imposed by the content providers, and such restrictions may make it difficult or impossible to analyze the parameters of a video file and/or video game.
Some existing systems include lighting devices that produce only various intensities and flickering of white colored light. A disadvantage of such systems is that while the television programs, movies, and video games typically include a wide variety of scenes, events, and action sequences, the known ambient light systems are limited to generating a single light color which may appear too repetitive to users and cause the users to lose interest in such ambient light effects.
Accordingly, what is needed is a way of producing ambient light effects in association with one or more portions of a video file that overcomes the aforementioned shortcomings.